Alan Macfarlane, 10 May 1990

“... The current political revolution in Nepal marks a further stage in the rapid integration of that country into the Western capitalist world. From a standing start in 1950, when the Ranas were overthrown and Nepal began to be transformed from a medieval oriental despotism into a modern nation-state, a great deal has been done. Between 1950 and 1980 the cumulative growth in various sectors has been estimated as follows: ‘70 times in power generation, 13 times in irrigation facility, 134 times in school enrolment, 12 times in number of hospital beds ...”

Alan Macfarlane, 24 July 1986

“... This is in many ways a fine study. In over six hundred pages of lucid and carefully presented material Professor Beattie has provided an exemplary analysis of the Surrey Assize and Quarter Sessions records between 1660 and 1800, as well as parallel records from the Sussex courts. It is done with subtlety and care. Concentrating on robbery, burglary, larceny, homicide, infanticide and rape, the author shows the patterns of prosecution and punishment ...”

Alan Macfarlane, 19 May 1983

“... England in the 19th century presented the enquiring foreigner with a series of strange paradoxes. It was the most urbanised country in the world, yet the one where the yearning for the countryside was the most developed. Its anti-urban bias was shown in the prevalence of parks, the ubiquity of flower gardens, the country holiday industry, the dreams of retirement to a honeysuckle cottage, and the emphasis on rural values in the Romantic and Pre-Raphaelite movements ...”

“... included contributions concerning European history from Norman Cohn, Peter Brown, Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane, all professional historians. They were fully integrated with the contributions of the anthropologists. Since that date it has become increasingly common both in this country and elsewhere for historians and social anthropologists to ...”

J.S. Morrill, 7 May 1981

“...Alan Macfarlane likes to shock historians out of their complacency and out of a narrow preoccupation with their own period or their own mode of historical study. He is a professionally-trained historian and a professionally-trained anthropologist and his approach is truly interdisciplinary rather than multidisciplinary ...”

“... witch-hunt begins with a series of books published nearly thirty years ago by Hugh Trevor-Roper, Alan Macfarlane, Keith Thomas and Erik Midelfort. Until very recently, however, it was the history of trials on the Continent alone that seemed a lively subject, and in 1996 Diane Purkiss could still properly complain of ‘the torpor of English witchcraft ...”

Jenny Diski: A cup of tea, 19 June 2003

“... and political discrimination have been central to its production and consumption. Although Alan Macfarlane is a profession-al anthropologist, his book on tea, Green Gold, is a personal investigation, the work of a hobbyist (he has built a Japanese tea house in his back garden) rather than an academic study. He was born on an Assamese tea estate ...”

“... has no such qualms about theorising about the fates of whole countries – indeed continents. Alan Macfarlane is well known for his bold theories about the forces shaping past societies, already advanced in such books as The Origins of English Individualism (1978) and Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction, 1300-1840 (1986), to say ...”

Alan Ryan, 21 January 1988

“...Alan Macfarlane’s little book on The Origins of English Individualism came out in 1978. It argued that England had been in crucial respects a ‘modern’ society ever since the 14th century and maybe earlier, and that most accounts of the transition to modernity were therefore misconceived, and in so doing it attacked just about every vested interest in contemporary historiography ...”

“... or temporary celibacy for a large part of the sexually mature population held numbers in check. Alan Macfarlane’s book is an important exploration of the effect on the institution itself of this use of marriage as a demographic control. He calls the control the Malthusian marriage system, not because Malthus understood that it was working, but ...”

“... arrangements? In The Origins of English Individualism (1978) the historical anthropologist Alan Macfarlane controversially questioned the notional transition in England from medieval feudalism to early modern capitalism. There was no evidence for a peasant society in 15th-century England, as far as ...”

Conrad Russell, 12 March 1992

“... disclaimers about the untypicality of Havering, one must note that all this fits the paradigm of Alan Macfarlane’s Origins of English Individualism rather better than it does that of some more traditional interpretations. We have here a body of questions which badly need testing in other places. Some, at least, of Dr McIntosh’s findings fit firmly ...”

“... these peasants any different from the English peasantry of this age whose individualism has made Alan Macfarlane question the genuineness of their peasant status in his recent Origins of English Individualism? What is the relationship between the incipient Protestantism of many of the opinions here recorded – the scorn for the Catholic priesthood and ...”

Leslie Wilson, 2 December 1993

“... unable to piss. The victim’s neighbour begins to scream and is identified as the witch. Just as Alan Macfarlane, studying Essex witches, found a large proportion of physicians among the cunning men, here the witchdoctor is an actual doctor. But the reference to ‘newfangled machines in smart new hospitals’ indicates that it has been in common ...”

I.M. Lewis, 18 June 1981

“... witchcraft and have been assimilated in the more recent works by historians like Keith Thomas and Alan MacFarlane. No apology is needed for their rehearsal here since, despite (or perhaps because of) their classic status, they are regularly misrepresented even by anthropologists who should know better. Jeanne Favret-Saada’s foray into contemporary ...”